Project Zomboid is the ultimate in zombie survival. Alone or in MP: you loot, build, craft, fight, farm and fish in a struggle to survive. A hardcore RPG skillset, a vast map, a massively customisable sandbox and a cute tutorial raccoon await the unwary. So how will you die?

Recent Reviews:

Very Positive
(145)
- 86% of the 145 user reviews in the last 30 days are positive.

All Reviews:

Very Positive
(14,861)
- 86% of the 14,861 user reviews for this game are positive.

Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Project Zomboid is a much more ambitious game than we could ever have hoped to fund ourselves. It has grown massively over the years, and it’s been a rollercoaster, but we now find ourselves in a stable financial situation with an overall positive reaction from the Steam community. We hope you will join us, but if not we understand. If you're not ready to jump in yet, then please consider us when we break out of Early Access.

How often do we update the community?

We have weekly newsletters known as 'Thursdoids’ which we publish on our site and on Steam every Thursday. These detail what we've been up to during the week, often with sneak peeks of upcoming features, interviews and videos. If a blog is fairly dry they’ll sometimes only be posted on our website, but we've had this unbroken chain of ‘doids for a long time and (although when milestones have been reached we may switch to doing them every two weeks) we certainly intend to continue them for the foreseeable future.

How often do we update?

We have a reputation that seems to diverge greatly when it comes to update frequency depending on who you ask. Many consider our game frequently updated, some consider us slow. Some public builds have arrived after three months, others with bigger features have taken more than six. You can see all our public build content, and the dates of release, here.After a build is released and patched we reopen our public unstable beta, known as the IWBUMS (I Will Back Up My Save) branch – so the community can test it, and help out by reporting bugs. During these times, the greater proportion of the development calendar, we try to update the IWBUMS beta every Thursday.

Some features, particularly NPCs and the new animation system required for their implementation, have taken a very long time to implement. This is largely out of our commitment to getting the features right and them not disappointing on release, but it should be noted that we make no apology for delaying their release until we feel they would be enjoyed, live up to people’s expectations, and most importantly do not have a detrimental effect on the gameplay or stability of the game.

We now work in partnership with several other companies to facilitate all this (General Arcade, and The Eccentric Ape for example) and have also greatly expanded our own staff in the past year.

We will admit to a few long waits between updates in the past, and far longer waits for big features, but we feel from community feedback that the majority of our customers are satisfied with the development of the game.

It should be pointed out too that the game has significant modding support, with map editors and full unrestricted lua modding access, and as such have a vibrant modding community for players to check out.

It should also be taken into consideration that the game is already very far through development, we’d estimate that we’re 75% complete at this point, and we also now have many 1000+ hour players. There is a lot of content to enjoy in the game already and we firmly and proudly believe it worth its current price as it stands.

Please consider reading some reviews if you are still unsure about the content of the game, the release frequency or the debate over the features that have been implemented and those still to come.

Again, full details of all updates to PZ since the release on Steam can be found here.

What is required for 1.0?

Now vehicles have been released to PZ players there are two major features that are yet to be implemented, the first of which is a requirement for what we want to achieve with the second.

New animation system – a new animation and model system that will allow for more varied and engaging interactions within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone. Allowing better character clothing, more variation in zombies and far greater modding power for the community.

This system is now being developed alongside our friends at The Eccentric Ape, and will also allow for new animations for stealth mechanics (looking round corners, crouching behind walls, cover etc) as well as a rewrite of the combat system to leverage new animations to make combat more involved, intuitive and fluid.

NPCS - A far reaching and in-depth NPC system with character relationships, personalities, and an emergent story engine that allows for diverse and emergent character based zombie survival story unique to every playthrough. This will also include the return of Kate and Baldspot who starred in the early alphas of the game.

Several features also require either significant modifications, rewrites or completion before we could consider 1.0.

Map completion - We still have a major city (our fictionalised version of Louisville, built to a more PZ scale) and an Army base. The rest of the map, which is already pretty vast, can be found here.

UI Rewrite - The UI isn’t perfect by any stretch. We would like to get a more intuitive and ergonomic UI system implemented.

We avoid ETAs because Early Access development in particular is often filled with unknowns. We want to ensure we get these highly anticipated features right.

In the meantime however we will continue to update the game and provide new features for our community to play with. While certain developers work alongside our friends at T.E.A. and General Arcade on the ‘bigger’ features we have others devoted to the day-to-day maintenance of the current game: balancing, new crafting recipes, vehicle gameplay, weather systems, professions etc.

What about after 1.0?

At this point, once we feel we have fulfilled every promise we gave when the Project Zomboid site first launched (except the last one, ahem, ignore that. Absolutely no one wanted that, it turned out), as well as the extra things detailed above, and the game is sufficiently polished and bug free, we will launch the game as 1.0 and leave Early Access.

What happens at this point depends entirely on whether the game is making money or not, but given the past solid performance of the game we see no reason why it shouldn’t be. Several developers within the team will likely start exploring our second project, however we have dedicated and passionate devs who were brought into the company via the Project Zomboid modding community, emotionally invested in the game, who are already a big part of the development and communicating with the community. As long as Project Zomboid is making enough to support their continued development of the game, and they are happy to continue working on it (which seems likely), we will continue making Project Zomboid. ”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“See above!”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“See above!”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“See above!”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“It will likely be £5, $8 more expensive once we hit 1.0. Due to our commitment to making sure early adopters get the cheapest price in appreciation of their early support PZ will never appear in sales that take it below the original alpha price of £5/$8 until we are a long time post 1.0. This commitment also means that, until 1.0 and the price increase, we will never be willing to go beyond a 40% sale.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

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BUNDLE (?)

May 2

Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last few weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.

Here’s a quick video that shows whereabouts we currently are with the internal anims build, with subtitles to highlight work still to be done – which will also hopefully provide an accurate picture of what it’ll look and feel like to play.

As you can see there’s a lot of general smoothening of rough edges happening on the build at the moment, and likewise alongside our friends at TEA we still need to plug in work on rotational blending, MP hook-ups and the work on the zoom that led to the sharper-looking models we showed off in past weeks.

With that put up top then, let’s have a look at some of the other stuff that’s being introduced into the next PZ build.

BODIES EVERYWHERE

In Build 41 we will be adapting the lore slightly (hopefully forgivably) by making it so that the zed impulse to bite someone who’s unturned isn’t entirely removed after their death. Idle zeds will be slightly attracted to human corpses, and will crouch to feed – meaning you can sneak by or attack without them noticing you as easily. This can be seen in the vid below:

Meanwhile, the same event can be added to our growing roster of interesting scenes we can spawn in random houses, which can be seen in the below screenshot– which is also a good example of how neatly ChrisW’s cutaway system will be improving the game.

(Please also note that since this screenshot and video were taken we’ve added in more poses for feeding zombies – so they won’t all be doing the more human-like crouch, and some will be on their knees and pawing at the corpse.)

In the current build the discovery of survivor bodies can be quite crude, with bleach or alcohol bottles scattered around willy-nilly for example. With our new systems we can also quite easily add in bodies that tell a clearer and neater story. Even if it’s as simple, and tragic, as someone who died from self-inflicted gun wounds.

[PLEASE NOTE THIS IMAGE IS WIP - POSES ETC WILL BE MORE VARIED AND IMPROVED]

OTHER NEWLY IMPLEMENTED ANIMATIONS

[Traditional disclaimer: work in progress! Improved/sharper character models seen in previous blogs not yet in main test build!]

Here’s a quick vid that shows off the ability to pour out liquid from a container, the ability to sit on the ground to have a rest, and an idle that shows the survivors warming themselves in front of a heat source.Crikey, this game's quite dark isn’t it?

We will be releasing our new AnimZed dev tools to the community when we release this version (perhaps even when we are still in IWBUMS testing if the documentation is ready) and just wanted to touch on the sort of thing that could be done quite easily with them once they’re available.

For example, a while ago Martin made us some skeleton models. These are primarily intended for use when exposing bone under character flesh when mortal body damage occurs. Likewise, bodies that have been feasted on may have exposed limb bones where the flesh has been picked clean – and on top of that, there's always the opportunity for crawlers to be dragging skeletal bloody legs across the floor and for more damaged zeds to be appearing in Six Months Later and beyond.

All that’s still to come though, and as a quick mod experiment on his birthday (when he should have been having a day off) RJ decided to have a look what they’d look like if used in-game in their entirety.

The results are a bit rough still, but we’re sure you’ll agree: Boom, there’s the beginnings of aHarryhausen or fantasy mod. Good times to come hopefully.

SMALLER CARS

We had been waiting for the animations build to resize cars, due to the difference in size between our old and new character models. Yuri has now done some magic, and readjusted the physics – so now the in-game vehicles look like this. Which, we reckon, is a nice improvement.

Now Yuri is tweaking his water effects, adjusting the intensity of their outlines and improving the banks of rivers, while also looking to improve the vehicle saving system so (very rare) events of car loss can be eradicated.

WINDOW HOPPING

Something else that might be of worthy of mention, and a quick vid, are some examples of where the new animations system are highlighting ‘in-between’ states that the game could previously get away with – but now either look weird, or have resulted in a show-stopper bug.

A good example of this is when a player either bumped into a zed when escaping through a window, or was very closely pursued by zeds when escaping – this was not only resulting in visual weirdness in the anims build, but also was trapping the player in the window frame for all perpetuity. As such, after a consultation with Animator Martin, we can use this sort of situation for some cool new gameplay considerations.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a WIP animation, and whatever anyone tells you – the big saucepan is a bug that’s already been fixed and won’t be in the final build. (We’re also working on more 'table against window' polish).

On top of this we will be improving this further – perhaps with a zed grabbing and pulling you into the window instead of pushing you out.

Anyway, those are the main headlines. If you’d rather read ‘em on a weekly basis, alongside the smaller details we’re ticking off and issues we’re addressing, then check the website or the Steam forum. Thanks all!

This is the fourth monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both on our website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. That’s all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!

April 4

Hey all, here’s the highlights of the last four weeks of Project Zomboid development – compiled from the Thursday blogs that appear at http://www.projectzomboid.com/blog/ and on the PZ Steam boards.

First off here are a couple of gameplay videos. This first one is a demonstration of ‘zoned zombie outfits’ – which is essentially the system that ensures that firefighter zombies spawn in fire stations, chef zombies spawn in restaurant kitchens and the like. (Please note that there are a few individual animations in this vid we want to speed up, and in most cases already have done)

Next up, meanwhile, we’ve had some significant improvements and fixes made by Bitbaboon Mark to the core animation blending system in past weeks. He’s fixing a whole bunch of issues, snaps and glitches that have been vexxing us for a long time – digging deep into the code, and doing a total rewire where necessary.

In prior Thursday vids we cut around these uglinesses as much as possible, but they still reared their heads. Snaps between character animations, jarring moves when turning to certain compass directions while strafing, and various other ugly things that we just couldn’t account for were plaguing us – but have now finally been fixed, leading to a far smoother animation blending system.

Zac’s prepared a video demoing the new blending – although please note he’s running in debug, so this doesn’t represent gameplay.

Speaking of, please note, that we’ve decided to put the completion of the high-res model rendering work described in the last Spiffo update on ice for little longer, since there were still numerous issues with it that meant it wasn’t suitable to put into the main line – and also it kept getting further broken by the flurry of additions and changes from the team’s work described above.

We feel it would be best approached toward the end of Build 41 dev just before IWBUMS, at the point we could get extra resources on board to get it working right. As such all videos until then will use the traditional character resolution.

TORN CLOTHES AND BLOOD

Zac’s work on masking out different parts of clothing items has resulted in several extremely useful features. First, it now allows us to wear pieces of geometry clothing on top of other geometry clothing – as opposed to being a texture drawn over the character’s skin. This used to be impossible: the clothing worn underneath would always poke through the geometry of the clothing on top, especially when moving.

So now we can layer clothing appropriately, and also spray blood on individual layers and garments – instead of your survivor’s body as a whole.

Our old solution was to to draw underclothing as textures directly on the character model, which unfortunately led to the side effect of them looking like body paint and lacking the bulk of real clothing. Now we can easily turn off areas of the clothing that are covered, so we are provided with many more options.

This also allows us much more visual indications of damage and clothing wear and tear (quite literally).

As well as putting a player’s newly scavenged/treasured Spiffo shirt at risk of damage, this will allow much more variety with zombies in particular. RJ has been adding code to implement this new system to further randomize zombie’s clothing conditions, and tie potential clothing damage into the various game systems for the player.

Our primary rule with Build 41 is that we’re updating animations to complement and add foundation to our existing gameplay, rather than get too excited and add in loads of new systems that could otherwise wait till a later version.

A good example of this is something that’s been in the game for a while, but have always been hidden slightly: our annotated survivor maps that show you the way to various hidden stashes.

Now though, to create a bit of a breadcrumb trail for players to follow, we have introduced ‘uniformed’ survivor zeds. They are the walking corpse of a survivor like yourself, who will not only carry some handy loot, but also potentially lead you to a place of interest.

They will always be rare and spawned in a big crowd of zombies, but also appear bloodied and messed up and wear a neat backpack. One of our prototype Survivor Zeds looks a little like this:

Over with General Arcade Yuri has been continuing his visual effect work – and has fine-tuned his water so that waves and ripples aren’t as small. When it was windy in-game this was fairly uncomfortable on the eyes of our internal testers, so they now look like this.

Right now he’s also addressing something that’s been an issue with cars since their introduction, but that we were waiting to address once the differently proportioned new character models were in-game. As such, say hello to the more sensibly-sized cars that Yuri’s currently updating the physics for:

GENERAL GAMEPLAY ADDITIONS

Here’s a quick run-down of other items of interest that have gone into the internal branch of Build 41 over the past month.

Extended idle animations. Depending on your character moodles, pain or other variable, you’ll sometimes see you character scratching an arm, shivering, checking his weapon, wipe his legs to check for blood etc.

New timed action animations, alongside fixes for the current timed actions: digging graves with a shovel, looting on the ground or in shelves, cleaning blood etc.

New outfits are also being added along with their own zone - Gigamart employee for example, and branded logo-ed shirts for various locations.

New animation variants for the player defending against zombie bites. Three new variations of zombies thumping on objects.

We’ve gotten ChrisW’s Sims-style wall cutaway system into the main line, but there are still a few issues to work out before its 100% operational.

Garage doors can now be opened. – huzzah. We will also be addressing the size of garages on the main map, and at the same time adding some more signage to the Exclusion Zone road network

Support for characters to lower and raise hoods on hooded clothing, for example hoodies and certain coats, have been added alongside several new idle animations used when the character has injuries.

Zach continues his great work adding more tools and features, this time to allow Martin and the other devs to quickly add and test new costume pieces through the AnimZed editor and preview them in game.

We have added many clothing items such as a poncho, hoodies, scarfs, aprons and swimming outfits. RJ also now has hair and beard styles being associated with zone costumes (for e.g. so you don’t tend to get military zombies or cops with hippy hairstyles and big beards).

Oh, and just today we found a way to make PZ feel a little more American.

This is the third monthly Steam round-up of development news for Project Zomboid, but weekly Thursdoid blogs are posted both on our website and on the Steam discussion boards. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Our thanks to our good friend Xeonyx for creating the header image using the internal anims build. That’s all for now, keep tabs on our website for more every week!

Reviews

“What can I say? This game's interface looks so simplistic by today's standards, and yet the Indie Stone team has managed to possibly create one of the best post-apocalyptic zombie survival games in existence to date.”Max Power! (105 hrs)

“The gameplay is surprisingly addicting, sometimes I look at the clock and wonder where the last 4 hours went, but looking at my fort shows me where they went.”syfy2K4 (1,021 hrs)

About This Game

Project Zomboid is an open-ended zombie-infested sandbox. It asks one simple question – how will you die?

In the towns of Muldraugh and West Point, survivors must loot houses, build defences and do their utmost to delay their inevitable death day by day. No help is coming – their continued survival relies on their own cunning, luck and ability to evade a relentless horde.

Current Features

Hardcore Sandbox Zombie Survival Game with a focus on realistic survival.

Online multiplayer survival with persistent player run servers.

Local 4 player split-screen co-op

Hundreds of zombies with swarm mechanics and in-depth visual and hearing systems.

Full line of sight system and real-time lighting, sound and visibility mechanics. Hide in the shadows, keep quiet and keep the lights off at night, or at least hang sheets over the windows.

Vast and growing map (loosely based on a real world location) for you to explore, loot and set up your fortress. Check out Blindcoder’s map project: https://map.projectzomboid.com/

Vehicles with full physics and deep and realistic gameplay mechanics.

Use tools and items to craft weapons, barricade and cook. You can even build zombie proof forts by chopping trees, sawing wood and scavenging supplies.

Deal with depression, boredom, hunger, thirst and illness while trying to survive.